Eternally confused & curious

me: no live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality

to wit:

bottom's the raw capture, middle's just flat curve correction to make the footage visible, top is the final coloring with /counts seven adjustment layers to add back in Literally Anything But Yellow

This thing has been out of print for like, 26 years and some of us want to make chubby classic pikachu so uh... I figure it's okay to share bc it's kinda hard to get your hands on the remaining physical copies.

Bonus points: Aelith made some embroidery/applique files for it too

This is FREE, please don't pay for the pattern.

Only the EMBROIDERY is paid.

It's only forever. Not long at all.

(Apologies for my long absence from any meaningful posting here - I'd run out of things to say for a long while, but my discoveries today warrant a return to the world of Labyrinth!)

I had a fascinating visit to the study room at the David Bowie Centre at V&A East today, where I requested all their papers relating to Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. I made one particularly exciting discovery: two completely ‘new’ songs Bowie wrote for the film. 

I can’t share the full lyrics for either song to avoid falling foul of copyright law, but the songs are titled ‘All in All’ and ‘Crystal Heartbeat’. Both songs have full lyrics, and are written in Bowie’s own hand. If you want to access either lyric sheet, the V&A archive reference is DBA/4/1/14/2.

I enclose ‘new’ with quotation marks very deliberately because I have the impression that these are both draft lyrics for what would become ‘As the World Falls Down’ (‘All in All’) and ‘Underground’ (‘Crystal Heartbeat’). This is an educated guess on my part, but I believe it’s likely based on the lyrical evidence. 

Like ATWFD, ‘All in All’ (27 lines) is a love song with a woozy feel - it’s bombastic and filled with grand romantic gestures, and literally quotes the phrase “in the heat of the morning” (the title and refrain of an early Bowie song). IMHO, it’s easily the superior of the two ‘new’ songs. 

‘All in All’ seems well-aligned with the more didactic early drafts of the ‘Labyrinth’ script, which was written by Terry Jones to present Jareth as a more straightforwardly manipulative trickster hiding beneath a facade of physical beauty. It’s filled with Jareth’s overwrought declarations of love (unlikely as it may seem, his love is bigger than the sun that shines!) and invites Sarah to join him in a world of pretend. ATWFD is definitely better from a lyrical perspective, and certainly more nuanced, but 'All in All' isn't half bad.

‘Crystal Heartbeat’ (23 lines) is simpler and less lyrically complex, and has a similar theme of being lost in the confusion of adolescence to ‘Underground’. It’s highly repetitive and feels like an up-tempo dance track (thus why I think it’s an early attempt at the main credits theme).’Underground’ is vastly superior from a lyrical perspective, so it’s easy to see why this draft was ditched. 

There are also handwritten lyric sheets for ‘As the World Falls Down’ and ‘Magic Dance’ (on the same sheet), ‘Within You’ and ‘Underground’. These lyrics are mostly very similar or identical to the versions included in the film, though ‘Magic Dance’ has some interesting annotations on delivery (so “what could I do” had “fun” written in the margin).

The only song without handwritten lyrics is ‘Chilly Down’, though there are various storyboards and correspondence relating to that particular song in the archive. It was clearly one of the harder nuts to crack, given the technical complexity of the Fire Gang scene (with the puppets filmed against black velvet, and the sequence workshopped over many iterations). 

On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.

raccoons and possums and foxes and crows all succeed in an urban environment because they’re opportunistic and observant. and almost none of them would have observed us pounce on one of their species and then start eating it, you know? a lot of them would have observed that we scream and chase them out of wherever we don’t want them to be, but other animals are territorial too. but there’s a number of situations where humans feed whoever’s bold enough to take them up on the offer, and we do tend to pull garbage off of other animals as soon as they slow down enough for us to catch. ‘a human got me but nothing bad happened’ is a much more frequent thing than ‘a human got me and tried to eat me’.  

I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.

Of the stories I’ve read, the food of the Fae, its origins and effects, are often strange and/or obscure.- Just like our food to most animals.

The Fae are strange beings that seem to know weird things that give them power or an edge over us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae work and live by strange rules also often nonsensical or obscure to us.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae can easily obtain vast amounts of things we consider rare/precious/desireable, and have no problem with dishing it out wantonly for no other reason than amusement.- Just like us to animals.

The Fae sometimes are amused by having us around, but only on their terms and IF it amuses/intrigues them.- Just like us to animals.

-they have wild and unexpected parties where you’d least expect to find them, but if you’re bold enough to entertain them they’ll feed you and caress you and play with you all night.

-time runs strangely in their realm. their homes are summerlands: warm and bright, no matter the season. there is always fruit on their tables. but not everyone who comes in from the cold is let back out again.  

-their games are cruel and complex and unfair, but if you can beat them by their own rules you will access riches beyond imagining.

-sometimes they just fucking fuck with you, the fuckheads.

-they will absolutely steal your children away. when your children return— if they ever do— they will come back strange. they will have magic earrings or necklaces or bracelets. they will know things they shouldn’t. they won’t know things that they should. your strange children might survive, might even prosper, might take wives and husbands and have children of their own. but they will always be marked by their time away from your world.

-the price for pissing them off is always death. sometimes just you. sometimes your whole community.